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Forum rules
This forum is meant for general questions about the usability of OJS from an everyday user's perspective: journal managers, authors, and editors are welcome to post questions here, as are librarians and other support staff. We welcome general questions about the role of OJS and how the workflow works, as well as specific function- or user-related questions.

What to do if you have general, workflow or usability questions about OJS:

1. Read the documentation. We've written documentation to cover from OJS basics to system administration and code development, and we encourage you to read it.

2. take a look at the tutorials. We will continue to add tutorials covering OJS basics as time goes on.

3. Post a question. Questions are always welcome here, but if it's a technical question you should probably post to the OJS Technical Support subforum; if you have a development question, try the OJS Development subforum.

A couple of years ago one of our journals deleted the account of an editor. When they did this, they lost access to a number of features on the back end of submissions assigned to that editor, e.g. the upload box for a copyedit version became inactive even with a new editor assigned to the manuscript. At the time, they worked around by re-posting the articles via expedited publish with a new editor assigned to restore access to those features.

This same journal now wants to clean up its journal editor, editor and section editor enrollments. The current editor has a note about the previous event advising her not to delete or unenroll anyone in these roles as a caution based on their experience.

Can you please confirm the expected system behaviour re: manuscript publishing workflow access (i.e. the back end) if an editor responsible for that articleID is a) unenrolled as an editor of the journal and b) their account is deleted entirely?

We are running OJS v.2.4.3.

Thank you in advance for guidance. We know that we can test this locally but I feel I need confirmation from PKP on how OJS is expected to work in this situation.

If an account is unenrolled from its Editor enrollment, but the account itself (email, username, etc.) continues to exist in the system, there should be no change in the operation of the system -- just that the user will no longer be able to access Editor elements of the system.

If an account is deleted entirely, by the use of the "Merge Users" feature, all of the user's "assets" (editorial assignments, reviews completed, etc.) will be reassigned to another user as selected during the Merge process. I don't recommend doing this because it alters the record-keeping of the system. It also shouldn't cause other users to have trouble continuing the workflow on those submissions.

I'm not sure how either of these approaches could cause a submission to be stuck for other Editors -- is it still around to perform some debugging on?

I think what went wrong last time was that the user wasn't merged at all - they just deleted her account completely with no merge process. I am assuming that would explain the total loss of access to the assets. The journal affected fixed all the affected manuscripts (replacing existing ones with new ones via expedited publish), but I don't think any debugging is necessary - the information you have provided seems sufficient guidance for me. I will pass it on to the journal.